Save Our World and Win a Prize

Sci-Fi writers needed to prevent space-time meltdown

By Jesse Furgurson

A top team at Los Alamos recently went public with findings that have shaken the scientific community to its core. Using heretofore-classified wormhole technology, the team has managed to observe an alternate reality, largely the same as our own, but with one difference — three Maryland science fiction fans are about to become prize-winning writers.
While this may seem like a benign variation, the team has also learned that this alternate reality is drifting toward our own and will begin to overlap it in a matter of weeks. If our reality is proceeding in exactly the same fashion as this other reality, life will go on as usual and its intrusion will go undetected by the vast majority of people. But if these sci-fi mavens do not materialize, our reality could be warped, or perhaps even (as some alarmists suggest) destroyed.
The Baltimore Science Fiction Society has quickly assembled a contest for the purpose of finding and awarding these writers. The deadline is June 15, when the alternate reality is set to reach the outer limit of our own.
Winners will be announced October 12 at Capclave, a convention organized by the Washington Science Fiction Association, just as the two realities completely harmonize. In addition to the satisfaction of having maintained the stability of the space-time continuum, winners will receive prize money (1st place: $250; 2nd: $100; 3rd: $50). First-place winners will be invited to read their work at the sci-fi convention Balticon in 2014 and have their work published in the Baltimore Science Fiction Society’s convention guide.
Submissions may range from 1,000 to 5,500 words. Authors must be 18 or older, Maryland residents or students at Maryland colleges and cannot be members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America or have had their work published in a sci-fi/fantasy magazine.
Send entries to bsfs-amc@bsfs.org, with the subject heading BSFS Contest Submission: [Your Title].
Godspeed, potential authors. We’re all counting on you.